Focusing on the case study of the so-called ‘European refugee crisis’ in Greece since 2015, the research highlights new insights into the motivations, experiences, and challenges of international volunteers in humanitarian relief operations. Unlike previous analyses on volunteer motivations, this study’s analytical framework is built on a combination of the functional (psychological) and symbolic (sociological) approach to the theory of motivation. With the help of Clary and Snyder’s Volunteer Functions Inventory, seven motivations of volunteers are outlined. Further, volunteers’ challenges, including psychological stressors are identified with the help of the Maslach Burnout Inventory. Building on a mixed methods research design, 66 responses to an online survey were enriched with data from six in-depth interviews. The study displays volunteers’ typical socio-demographic characteristics to be young, female European students, who come to Greece on their own, who finance their stay through personal income, and who tend to stay between one to three months. The analysis reveals volunteers’ motivations to be first and foremost altruistic; however, internationals are also influenced by other, more self-centered motivations, including their desire to learn through hands-on skills, and to advance their career. Motivations to prolong their volunteer commitment or to return to Greece particularly include social bonds built during previous engagements, the incentive to reduce feelings of guilt over being more fortunate than others, and the desire to relive experiences of increased self-fulfillment and personal growth. Dividing the sample by gender and age illustrates somewhat differing motivations among the sub-samples, leading to the conclusion that volunteers’ motivations are diverse, multifaceted, fluid, and placed somewhere along a spectrum between altruistic and egoistic aspirations. The study of people’s experiences overall suggests high satisfactions among the volunteers; however, sentiments of feeling at times overwhelmed and stressed are very present among most volunteers, regardless the length of their stay Greece or their performed activities. The workload, a too heavy burden of responsibility, lack of sufficient time to reenergize, lack of managerial support, and conflicts among volunteers particularly have the potential to lead to emotional exhaustion, depersonalized behavior, and challenges when returning home.

The recent collapse of the Dublin system, a system meant to distribute responsibility towards asylum-seekers and refugees between EU Member States (MSs), has marked a new phase of the so-called European Refugee “Crisis”, where the inability of EU MS governments to address the situation in a unified and coherent manner ultimately harms those most in need of protection. Public discontent with EU and MS government responses to the crisis has led to strong citizen mobilisation in the form of civil society. This study focuses on the case of the UK and examines the role played by policy advocacy Civil Society Organisations (CSOs). The concept of Political Responsibility is used to establish the emergence of a Governance Gap in the UK's response to the crisis, where the government finds itself unable to bridge a growing distance between its representation and responsible governance functions. Policy advocacy CSOs are found to be now minding this gap. Critical Discourse Analysis is used to study how CSOs react to the UK government's response in terms of practice and discourse, and to highlight the consequences which language use can have on how we perceive and treat refugees and asylum-seekers in this context.

The research focus of this study is to investigate the ways in which the so-called European refugee crisis has been socially constructed as number one urgent matter for the European community in the years between 2015-2017. Noting the unprecedented rise of the public support for far-right parties in the European polls, the goal of this study is to understand and conceptualize the ways in which the refugee crisis has been presented as an existential threat by the right-wing political leaders in the Netherlands, France and Germany, three core European members, which held elections in 2017. This has been done by utilizing the theoretical framework, composed of the Copenhagen School, as well as the categorization framework which builds upon the results from previous literature on the topic of the securitization of migration. In addition, by utilizing critical discourse analysis this study probes the hypothesis that regardless of the magnitude of the crisis, the securitizing discourses are largely revolving around four overarching realms: the identity, criminological, political and economic realm. The findings infer that the securitizing discourses of the right-wing leaders in the Netherlands, France and Germany in relation to migration are identical and are revolving around the aforementioned domains, regardless of the countries’ political landscape.

面對此次難民危機的挑戰，歐盟無法團結一致推行共同的難民庇護政策，反而造成各國內鬨爭端；整體而言，歐洲各國的難民庇護政策大致呈現緊縮的態勢，於此，本文試圖進一步探索：什麼因素促使反難民情緒逐漸高漲，進而影響難民庇護政策轉趨緊縮？其中，又有哪些面向對政策轉變具有顯著的效果？本文以德國、法國與奧地利為研究個案，聚焦國內經濟、文化與安全三大面向，試圖理解衝擊人民心理與情緒的社會焦慮，並提供一項更細緻的觀察與解釋。 本文發現，此次難民危機前，焦慮因子早已深埋各國社會之中，人民的經濟不安全感在歐債危機與撙節政策的衝擊下日漸加深，同時各國社會也為日益加劇的種族緊張關係所苦，而此兩項經濟與文化的焦慮因子是生成反難民社會焦慮的關鍵因素。難民危機期間，大批難民湧入衝擊人民的心理與情緒，不僅誘發並催化經濟與文化的焦慮因子，同時也帶來安全上的擔憂與威脅，催化各國的反難民社會焦慮，進而使各國的難民庇護政策轉趨緊縮。 / Faced with the refugee crisis, the EU had not only failed to come up with a common asylum strategy, but been plagued by increasing disputes among its Member States. The asylum policy of individual states had, in general, become more and more restrictive as the refugee crisis intensified. In order to understand the domestic factors contributing to the surge of anti-refugee sentiments, I take Germany, France and Austria as the cases and examine the dynamic developments of anti-refugee sentiments as well as the restriction-oriented asylum policy reforms that followed. The existence of the agents of societal anxiety in European countries predated the refugee crisis. Prior to the European debt crisis, the sense of economic insecurity was already palpable. The implementation of austerity policies greatly enhanced this sense of insecurity. Meanwhile, ethnic tensions or even conflicts were chronic in western European countries. These two agents of societal anxiety turned out to be significant factors in explaining the surge of anti-refugee sentiments. Furthermore, during the crisis, the sudden mass influx of refugees also had an impact on people’s perceptions and sentiments. Not only did it trigger the economic and cultural agents of societal anxiety, but also brought about the perceived security threat as well. Eventually, the anti-refugee sentiments, catalyzed and reinforced by these dynamics, contributed to restrictive asylum policy reforms.

This Master Thesis called "The Securitization of Immigration. An Assessment of the Extent of Securitization of Immigration in the German Political Discourse in the aftermath of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis" aims to identify the influence of the 2015 European refugee crisis on the German political discourse in reference to immigration and asylum. Since immigration became one of the greatest security concerns in the post-Cold War era, it appears plausible that the unprecedented high-numbers of asylum applications in 2015/16 triggered securitization in Germany. This impression is reinforced in reference to the increasing popularity of the anti-Islam, far-right PEGIDA movement and the right-wing populist party AfD. However, the merely welcoming attitude towards refugees among the German population, which attracted attention all over the world, challenges the securitization thesis, because the political discourse is assumed to be oriented towards public opinion. Thus, the political discourse in the aftermath of the 2015 European Refugee Crisis is assumed to be torn between fear (securitization discourse) and optimism (humanitarian discourse) in regard to immigration and asylum. By conducting a discourse analysis, contextualized speech-acts based on a generic structure used by Holger Stritzel were...

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This thesis explores the impact of the Syrian refugee crisis on the Common European Asylum System. It evaluates the extent to which the European Union was able to implement a common asylum system, identifies discrepancies between different European countries, primarily Germany and Hungary, and briefly examines the roots of these differences. To this end, the structure of the international refugee protection regime and the German and Hungarian asylum systems are analyzed. Furthermore, the thesis explores how the governments of the two countries perceive the rights of refugees and how their views have affected their handling of the crisis. The case studies of Germany and Hungary have revealed that the treatment of Syrian refugees varies enormously within the EU. Hence, the implementation of the Common European Asylum System has not been achieved, which can be attributed to the deficiencies within the system and the growing ideological rifts within the EU.